Archive for February, 2014

China’s Sina said its ad sales surged 45% in the fourth quarter to fuel big profit growth, as reports suggested the internet giant is preparing a U.S. initial public offering for its popular Twitter-like microblogging service, Weibo.

The Financial Times reported that Sina had asked Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse to prepare to spin Weibo off in a U.S. stock market listing.

The news came as a welcome break for a company hit by reports suggesting its Weibo user base is eroding after a government crackdown on online freedom of expression, and because of competition from hot mobile social app WeChat. Weibo is extremely viral, and brands rely on it to push out content, monitor chatter and react to crises.

Oracle has struck a deal to acquire BlueKai, a data management platform, the company said Monday. The terms were not disclosed, though reports put the price in the neighborhood of $400 million.

Oracle said it plans to integrate BlueKai with its previously acquired cloud marketing products: Responsys and Eloqua. If it can do that successfully, Oracle would give its customers the ability to more precisely personalize messages to consumers and b-to-b buyers — the people those products are used to reach.

The acquisition, subject to regulatory approval, is the latest move in the intensifying battle for cloud marketing supremacy. The race includes big name companies such as Oracle, Adobe, Salesforce, IBM and SAP. Each has snapped up key parts, but the race for the most complete offering has yet to be decided.

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On April 1, Ad Age’s Digital Conference comes to Pier 36 in Manhattan to bring you the future of marketing, one where “digital” itself is relegated to the dustbin of recent history along with all the meaningless jargon that came with it.

Facebook’s revenue streams, in part, are reliant on the massive storehouse of data it harvests on its users around the globe.

But not WhatsApp, Facebook’s startling multibillion-dollar acquisition. “Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it,” claimed WhatsApp in a June 2012 blog post explaining why the messaging service doesn’t sell ads.

The question on many minds is whether — or when — the tables will turn.

Much bandwidth has been consumed discussing the effects of Facebook’s recent algorithm change to favor sites offering “high quality” content. It’s been said to hurt viral sites like Upworthy — a notion the site’s founders have denied — while rewarding other publishers including Mental Floss.

But little has been said on how publishers seeing a traffic bump actually make money from those additional eyeballs.

Social media referrals now account for nearly 50% of overall traffic to some publishers’ sites. Facebook is eclipsing all others as the top traffic driver, according to a report last year from Shareaholic, a company that makes social media sharing tools.

TV networks are gearing up for their flashy presentations, which represnt the kick-off to negotiations with advertisers over fall prime-time programming.

As has been the case over the past several years, plenty of other digital media companies and publishers are also vyying for marketers’ TV budgets and holding NewFronts. New entrants this year include Vice, New York Times and Time Inc.

Use this handy calendar, sort-able by media company or date, to stay up on where and when the biggest parties will take place.

A couple months after Apple bought social data provider Topsy, social marketing software company Sprinklr has acquired social analytics firm Dachis Group to help marketers wrap their heads around the meaning of social media mentions. Sprinklr founder and CEO Ragy Thomas declined to disclose the terms.

Dachis Group CEO and Razorfish’s former CEO and co-founder Jeff Dachis will join Sprinklr’s board and become the company’s chief evangelist.